The Horrific Sufferings Of The Mind-Reading Monster Hercules Barefoot: His Wonderful Love and his Terrible Hatred (30 page)

With a hunter’s stealth it made its way up a flight of stairs.

Someone, the housemaid perhaps, had forgotten to close the door properly. A crack of light seeped through. The cat nudged the door. Saw it open.

Now it came into an illumined hallway. A corridor, infinitely long, ran the length of the house, with doors on either side. No movement, no sign of life.

Crouching low, the animal prowled on, hugging the walls as it went, spying, picking up scents, without knowing what mission it was on. From one room, laughter could be heard, from the kitchen a clatter, again the smell of food, inexorably censored by the alien will, driving it on towards another staircase covered in a thick oriental carpet, up to another floor in this strange house where stray cats normally never set a paw.

Then, at some inaudible signal, it halted. By now it was on a dark landing on the building’s top floor. A noise made it slink under a sideboard, there unprotestingly to await fresh instructions.

When the judge got home that afternoon he was met by a cacophony of agitated voices. Amid a swarm of servants gathered in the salon he saw his wife. Drawing her aside, he asked her what was going on.

The gardener had had his eye torn out, she explained excitedly, by the same beast that had attacked him that morning. No question about it, the cat was rabid.

The gardener lay outstretched on the floor, his face bandaged. A doctor was bending down over the poor man, shaking his head. “Jansen will be blind in one eye, I’m afraid,” he sighed. “There’s nothing I can do.”

His wife went on to give him a detailed account of what had happened. Following her husband’s instructions the gardener had set a trap, which the cat had simply ignored. Whereupon the gardener had attempted to chase it off the grounds. But no matter how he tried, it had refused to leave. In the end all the servants, and even she herself, had taken part in the hunt. But time and again the cat had outwitted them, taking refuge in trees or among the boxhedges’ dense growth and every other conceivable hiding place. At last the gardener had gone to fetch his fowling piece. For two whole hours that elderly man had lain on the roof of the coach house waiting for the cat to reappear. Two shots he’d let off, without hitting his target; and the cat, hissing and spitting, had disappeared into the wood that bordered the grounds. Everyone had returned to their duties, in the hope that they’d succeeded in scaring it away.

But later on in the afternoon, when their teenage daughters had ventured out into the garden, it had shown up again. By now, according to the judge’s wife, it had become so enraged that it was foaming at the mouth, “more like a dog than a cat”, and had attacked the girls, who’d only just managed to take refuge in the house, though one of them had had her knee scratched, and the younger girl, Maria, had twisted her ankle and thereto lost her silver necklace in her flight. Once more the gardener had gone out with the fowling piece; but it was as if the cat guessed what he was up to. The earth seemed to have swallowed it up.

Then, only an hour ago, his wife confirmed, it had turned up again, this time inside the house! No-one could explain how it had got there. There was something unsettling about the animal, as if it could make itself invisible.

Irritated by this intermezzo, which looked like spoiling his day, the judge followed his wife up to the top storey.

In the smoking room reigned a terrible disorder. Shattered glasses and china lay all over the floor, some paintings had been ripped to shreds and two armchairs had been overturned. There were bloodstains on the carpet. The place looked like a battlefield.

One of the housemaids had found the beast, his wife told him, when she’d gone up to get the table linen for dinner. Bold as brass, the cat, perched up on the bookshelf, had hissed, frightening the girl out of her wits. Instantly she’d called for the gardener who, armed with a cane, had gone upstairs to the smoking room.

When his wife came to this part of the tale she dissolved into silent sobs. It was as if the cat were insane, she insisted, arching its back and spitting. The gardener had chased it to and fro in the room, tipping over vases, glasses and furniture in the tumult. Then, driven into a corner, the beast had suddenly attacked, throwing itself with an unnatural leap at the gardener, and clawing him in the eye. The gardener had collapsed on to the floor, shouting that he could no longer see. The cat had disappeared in the commotion.

“Where is it now?” the judge asked.

“Somewhere in the house,” said his wife. The housemaid had heard it moving about in the attic, but no-one had dared go up there. Clearly it was out of its mind.

He and his wife went down to the salon. The servants had gone back to their duties. The gardener was sitting in a chair as the doctor felt his pulse. The judge asked where the fowling piece was and was told that it was hanging on a hook in the tool shed.

A little while later the judge was up in the attic. The light shed by the skylights was barely enough for him to see where he was going. He tripped over an old travelling trunk and swore loudly when he hit his hand against a beam in the roof. The scratch had begun to sting again, and the thought that his wife might be right, that the animal was rabid, made him shudder.

The roof space was quite. All he could hear were subdued murmurs from downstairs where the evening meal was being prepared. The cat, he thought, had probably managed to find a way out. Tomorrow he’d summon the forester.

For a little while he stood there, eyes closed, imagining the sort of things he could get up to with the young housemaid up here. She wouldn’t protest, he thought, no matter what he did to her. She was too young, too frightened, too powerless. He could even kill her.

He was just about to turn back when he heard a noise coming from the roof. Further along, one of the skylights stood ajar. Beneath it was a ladder. Feeling strangely dizzy, he climbed out on to the roof. The city lay sprawled out below him, St Mary’s Church, the Town Hall with its spire, the Artushof, Lange Gasse and Langer Markt. In the harbour the boats looked like toys. In the background gleamed the River Weichsel and the sea.

Then, without forewarning, he began hearing voices in his head: the voice of a ten-year-old girl he’d once drowned, the whimpering sounds made by a prostitute as he’d cut her breast off in a Königsberg brothel, the panting of the girl who had stabbed his genitalia with a knife in a Danzig hotel years ago. All followed by guffaws, hysterical laughter, the hissing of a crazed cat and the abbot’s whining as he’d climbed down from the prisoner’s cart at the place of execution.

Was he going mad?

On the furthest ridge of the roof, he saw the cat. It was standing up on its hind legs like a human being – and laughing at him. A wholly human laugh, with the corners of its mouth upturned. It was talking to him now, unimpededly, inside his head, in a flat, terrifying voice.
Come closer
, it said,
see how close I am, come closer
. And he himself was shivering inexplicably. I’ve gone mad, he thought. I’ve lost control of myself.

Yet something made him go on walking across the roof. It’s the cat making me do it, he thought, making me move my feet, step by step across the ridge – slippery though it is after the rain . . .

Fifteen metres below him, in the garden, he caught sight of his wife. She was calling up to him to take care, to come back down; but the voice, or rather the voices, hundreds of them, forming an enormous choir in his head, were screaming at him to keep moving, no matter what, impelling him to continue. Unbearable, incessant, the screams urged him towards the edge of the roof where the cat was standing on its hind legs, smiling at him – a wholly human smile.

Then he felt a completely novel sensation, a terrible itching in his maimed sexual organ. Never before had he experienced anything like it, it was as if thousands of lice were on the move down there, biting and tearing at his crotch making it itch in a way he didn’t believe possible.

Afterwards his wife, the venerable Rosalinda von Kiesingen, who was following his perilous balancing act from her seat in the stalls down in the garden, would remember his movements as being like those of someone submerged in water, as if he’d been trying to swim his way across the roof and how, when he fell, he’d done so with abnormal slowness, in a wide arc over the stone-paved terrace.

From the perspective of a stray cat, all this looked quite different. All it saw was a clumsy, staggering human animal with a panic-stricken look on its face, like one of its prey fleeing from some real or imaginary pursuer. At most, the cat, erect on its hind legs with its mouth curled up in a human leer abhorrent to and utterly out of keeping with nature, was amazed by its own unnatural stance.

IN THE VILLAGE
of Fossa, in the Abruzzi hills, a man is opening a wardrobe. Momentarily, on the wall behind the clothes hangers, a demonic face comes into view. An horrific sight, for the face is sorely maimed. The nose has been cut off. An eye plucked out. And both ears have been drawn out from their roots.

The man gasps, shuts the door, and collapses on the floor, pulled downward by earth’s implacable gravity and by the fear that has been pursuing him now for weeks on end. But his faith helps him get a hold on himself – faith, this thing humans so unhealthily confuse with remorse and fear of a life they’ve never even asked to be born into, but which imperceptibly takes possession of them and drives them on even so.

Knowing full well what lies in store for him, he reopens the door. This is how it has been these past few months; surprises recurring until they no longer surprise, only fill him with an icy fear, which is why he knows the maimed face will now have gone. Apart from the bag of mothballs on a hanger, the bag filled with his equipment, the black, leather-trimmed coat he wraps himself up in at night against the cold and the dreadful dream visions, the wardrobe is empty.

The nightmares, he thinks in despair, looking at the surface the face had just peered out from, these very real nightmares that haunt me and make me shun sleep.

But no-one can survive without rest, and in the end, at daybreak, the body, his unreliable body that doesn’t give a fig for his will and exposes him to the demons who climb uninvited in and out of his dreams, snatches an hour’s slumber for itself.

True to his motto that Satan’s cunning tricks are as manifold as mankind’s sins, he tries to brace himself. My faith will help me, he thinks, condemning this room that has ended by becoming a prison – a prison he daren’t leave, even in the daytime, because the demon is watching over the door, a room for travellers in a godforsaken village he has come to on a great quest, or, to be more exact, challenge. But his challenger has proved himself stronger than anything he could ever have imagined, for he has never before experienced delusions of this calibre.

He lies down on the bunk and closes his eyes. These sudden visions in broad daylight have been happening more frequently the past few days, as have the dreams that are no longer dreams, but journeys into an horrific landscape.

He wonders if he is nearing a settlement that can be at the end of this long journey to the Tropic of Darkness. An hour earlier, for instance, the room had filled with the pungent smell of smoke, a smell of burning human flesh, the crackling of something on fire. But when he’d turned round he could see nothing burning. Soon afterwards he, quite distinctly, had heard someone call his name, and when he’d answered automatically in a voice that for the last twenty-four hours had failed to speak, he’d been met by a cacophony of mocking laughter. Ordeals of this kind are continually assailing him. Woken by knockings on the wall, when he asks in anguish, “Who’s that?” he is answered with a sigh or someone teasingly whispering his name.

But that’s not all. At any moment he can be assailed, possessed, by music. His body becomes an acoustic chamber in which someone is everlastingly arranging concerts. He’s an organ made of flesh and bone on which someone is playing fugues, whole cantatas on the keyboard of his fears; pumping air through his fear’s organ pipes. He lacks words to describe the experience; the notes threaten to blow him up, they are playing so loudly inside him he’s afraid his eardrums will burst and the stagnant water inside come splashing out in a triad intoned with the Devil’s tuning fork, bringing on a fit of the shivers. He is terrified these delusions will drive him crazy. It is Satan tempting him, and he escapes into morbid broodings.

Is all this simply a delusion? Just like suffering and illness, he wonders, which perhaps only make sense if seen from the lofty viewpoint of the Creator? But if man is unable to see it all from this divine point of view, both the Creator and His creation can only appear to be evil.

God is one with His creation, say the theologians. But since evil is everywhere apparent in creation, is not then God, too, evil?

The demons tempt him with this thought. Because if it is true, equally in the murderer and in his victims, what is left for man to worship?

Satan exists, and he exists within himself. Creation isn’t perfect, and therefore neither is the Creator. Those people he knows in the Vatican . . . the learned theologians . . . they’re wrong when they maintain that evil isn’t really evil, only a lower level of goodness, or for that matter, an absence of goodness . . .

Now twilight is falling swiftly beyond the windowpanes where the demons, regular as clockwork, have been appearing. He looks out towards the mountains. The sky is monochrome. The trees leafless. He wishes he could leave the room, but doesn’t dare to.

Is evil an absence of good? he pursues his line of thought. Just as saltiness is a lack of sweetness, sorrow a lack of joy or black a lack of white? Attempts to save God’s honour suddenly strike him as laughable. What was it St Augustine wrote: “Evil is but goodness reduced to the point where it no longer exists.” But if that was so, how did the God he had served all his life relate to what he was being forced to experience now; to the trail he’d followed through the villages, to the disfigured face he’d just seen in the wardrobe, to Satan who was tempting him now as never before, who was trying to make him confess: “Yes, since my Lord doesn’t intervene, you are more powerful than He.”